In this commentary, I examine the experiment reported by Epstein et al. in section 5. What I show here is that the experiment is so poorly executed that little, if anything, can be concluded from it regarding the role of UG in L2 acquisition.

A defining moment in the history of generative research on language acquisition was the advent of the Principles and Parameters (P&P) approach (Chomsky 1981). Generative research on second-language (L2) acquisition was no different in this regard, but there was a distinct twist: The L2 research agenda has also often been informed by the possibility that the L2 learner may not have “access” to the innate linguistic endowment described by Chomsky and others (Bley-Vroman 1990, Clahsen and Muysken 1986). It was thus perhaps inevitable that one might find a volume like Point Counterpoint (Eubank 1991), in which researchers with generally opposing viewpoints addressed this possibility. However, while the issue will likely be examined again in future volumes, an appraisal of more recent L2 research suggests that the “access” question no longer dominates the L2 research agenda. Instead, more recent work suggests an agenda in which “access” to UG is presupposed. The purpose of this review is thus not only to review research on the L2 “access” thesis from the 1980s and 1990s, but, more importantly, to provide an overview of more recent L2 research that is not fundamentally constrained by this issue.

Ellis refers to a wide range of data supporting the uncontroversial claim that there are frequency effects in linguistic and other behavior. He further resurrects the long-discredited claim that language acquisition consists of frequency-based abstraction of regularities from input. What he fails to do is to show how the former claim leads to the latter, or indeed to show any evidence for this claim. Ellis ignores fundamental and well-known problems—the poverty of the stimulus, cases of instantaneous acquisition, evidence for innate knowledge, evidence that even children regularly ignore perceptual input, the compositionality of concepts, and the systematicity of language—that make his frequency-based account of acquisition a nonstarter.

Braidi's new textbook is intended to provide an overview of multiple perspectives onthe acquisition of second language syntax to “applied linguistics students” and“prospective L2 teachers” (preface, p. vii). After an introduction that lays a gooddeal of historical and conceptual groundwork, we find a chapter on “first-language andsecond-language interrelations” and then the core of the volume comprising a chaptereach on Universal Grammar (UG) perspectives, perspectives based in typological universals,processing approaches, and functional approaches. She ends with a conclusion that summarizesmajor findings and discusses implications for her readership. The text includes fairly extensivereferences as well as name, language, and subject indexes.

Well known for their work in first language (L1) acquisition, Crain and Thornton (henceforthC&T) have produced with their Investigations in Universal Grammar a thoroughreview of the innovative experimental techniques they developed to investigate the acquisition ofsyntax. In this sense, the volume would appear to be a kind of research-methods book. Thevolume is a great deal more, however. Indeed, in the volume's three main sections (16, 8,and 16 chapters, respectively), C&T present examinations not only of the nature ofhuman-language grammars but also of the factors that conspire to result in linguisticperformance. What makes the C&T volume superior is that they integrate theoreticalframework with methodological practice so seamlessly.

Imagine my surprise when I received an SLA textbook by Rod Ellis to review, and it turnedout to be a paperback weighing only 7 ½ ounces! Something must be different, and indeedit is: This new volume is intended for the novice student (or for others without academicengagement in linguistics). For such an audience, the volume opens up a fresh niche for SLAclasses, one that is not all that common, at least at North American universities.

John Schumann and colleagues (Jacobs, 1988; Jacobs & Schumann, 1992; Pulvermüller & Schumann, 1994; Schumann, 1990a, 1990b) have argued for a neurobiological perspective on language acquisition, one that denies a role for a specifically linguistic mental module of the sort proposed by, for example, Chomsky (e.g., 1986). In this paper, we challenge this perspective by offering evidence that such a mental module must be involved in the acquisition of grammatical competence.

It goes without saying that longitudinal second language (L2) data have contributed—and will continue to contribute—much to L2 theory construction, yet one of the more difficult problems involved with this and similarly large-scale corpora is their very manageability. In years past, a common solution to this problem involved creating card catalogs for what appeared to be crucial parts of the data; more recently, researchers have resorted to computational resources, generally electronic databases. Nonetheless, these solutions remained strictly local: Access to such analytical means was generally restricted to the researchers involved. This situation is beginning to change, however, because, as this report will show, more child as well as adult L2 data are finding their way into the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) archive, thereby permitting widespread access to these data.

In their recent contribution on the Garden Path Technique, Tomasello and Herron (1989) suggested that the experimental results they obtained on this means of providing negative feedback lend support to a “cognitive comparison model” of second language (L2) acquisition, and they further hypothesize that it may be useful in eliminating other L2 overgeneralizations. The results Tomasello and Herron (henceforth TH) present are clearly interesting, for they appear to show that negative evidence—here, a special type of error correction—may be crucial in L2 learning. As promising as the TH results may be, however, there is reason to believe that they also should be viewed with caution. In the following, we provide some of the reasons why caution should be taken.